Re-presenting representations

In Foucault's essay "Las Meninas", the French philosopher provides (and provokes) an unprecedented analysis of Velazquez's 1656 painting that broke from art historical interpretative practices which had been based on connoisseurship, artist's biography, stylistic analysis, and other conventional paradigm.



Foucault rendered a theoretical discourse that emphasized critical aspects of the painting. He begins with the relational aspect of the gaze and its role of reciprocity in the painting. "In appearance, this locus is a simple one; a matter of pure reciprocity: we are looking at a picture in which the painter is in turn looking out at us...And yet this slender line of reciprocal visibility embraces a whole complex network of uncertainties, exchanges,and feints." (p.4)

According to an online dictionary, feint is defined as: a movement made in order to deceive an adversary; an attack aimed at one place or point merely as a distraction from the real place of or point of attack. Although Velazquez, I don't believe, had any intention of an attack, his composition nonetheless was well calculated and quite intentional.

Scholars have been debating endlessly about placement in this painting. In the rear mirror, are we seeing the visages of King Phillip the IV and his queen Marianna as a reflection of their selves or a reflection of their double portrait on the large canvas that Velazquez is working on?



Joel Snyder and Ted Cohen has done a convincing job of arguing that according to the laws of perspective guiding the vanishing point in the picture, the reflection in the mirror cannot be that of the canvas. What they have affirmed in their study is that the room defies a "classical" axiom of representation.

(This article was not part of our reading but something I had read for another seminar. If interested, the article is on jstor:
http://www.jstor.org.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/stable/pdfplus/1343417.pdf)

Thus, things are not as simple as they may seem. We must question if the specific place in which the king and queen stood as models is the place where Velazquez desginated that we, as spectators, also stand. Additionally, how stable would that place be if it no longer follows the classical axiom of representation?

Like Cezanne's tables, what we had once perceived as a stable surface is slowly shifting under our very own feet.

If the place is slowly evolving, what of our gaze?

"Though greeted by that gaze, we are also dismissed by it, replaced by that which was always there before we were: the model itself." (p. 4)

Indeed, who was/is the model?

Wasn't Velazquez, the painter, one who also stood in that place of the model/spectator contemplating, configuring, designing, painting and ultimately gazing a long time at the scene before him? Wasn't he also serving as a model since the painting includes his self-portrait?

"No gaze is stable...the spectator and the model, reverse their roles to infinity. And here the great canvas with its back to us on the extreme left of the picrure exercises its second function: stuboornly invisible, it prevents the relation of these gazes from ever being discoverable or definitely established." (p.5)

If I can borrow Hal Foster's Lacanina diagram (from this week's reading), what Velazquez achieved with Las Meninas was the superimposition of the usual or "classical" cone into the double cone thus conflating and complicating the object-gaze.



"The first cone is familiar from the Renaissance treatises on perspective: the object focused as an image for the subject at a geometral point of viewing. But, Lacan adds immediately, 'I am not simply that punctiform being lcoated at the geometral point from which the perspective is grasped....The picture, certainly, is in my eye. But I, I am in the picture'" (Foster, p. 108)

With Las Meninas, we have a re-presentation of the object as the gaze and the picture as the subject of representation. Velazquez must have realized that the image/screen "mediates the object-gaze for the subject". The Spainish Baroque artist must have possessed the insight that "the screen as the site of picture-making and viewing, [is the place] where we can manipulate and moderate the gaze." (Foster, p. 109). With his signifying gaze, Velazquez had managed to open up on two sides (the front AND the back) the shutters of the window to the world.